Meet the AI Meme Millionaire

Summary

The Startup Ideas Podcast

Episode: Meet the AI Meme Millionaire

Host: Greg Isenberg (featuring guest Ben, founder of Wombo)
Date: September 3, 2025

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Overview

In this engaging episode, Greg Isenberg (sometimes joined by Sam Parr for context) interviews Ben, the creator of one of the most viral AI-powered mobile apps, Wombo. The discussion dives deep into how Ben leveraged open source AI models and meme culture to achieve over 250 million installs—and later, how he pivoted to launching new AI ventures backed by prominent investors like Nvidia. The episode is packed with insights on how to identify viral startup ideas, details behind app growth strategies, and real talk about the monetization rollercoaster that follows explosive app success. Aspiring founders will learn actionable steps to create stupid-simple but wildly viral apps—and hear a candid founder journey full of hard-earned lessons, meme magic, and bold predictions for the future of AI-powered mobile startups.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Copying (“Mimesis”) and Remixing

• [00:45] Ben introduces his core strategy: “If something is working, then probably you can copy it and put your own spin on it and it'll continue to work.”
• This principle, inspired by his time as a competitive gamer, underpins his entire entrepreneurial philosophy.

2. spotting Viral Trends and Lowering Friction

• [02:00] Ben discusses identifying early signals from apps like Reface and viral AI memes—memes use open source AI models but require technical skill.
• Seeing technical tools trend on platforms like Discord or with creators can indicate mainstream opportunity if you remove complexity.

3. Building Wombo: From Idea to 100M+ Downloads

• [04:05] Ben: "Why doesn’t someone just make an app, like, where anyone can do this, where it’s simple?”
• He and his team noticed that AI-powered meme tools were inaccessible to average users; by simplifying into a 4-screen mobile app, they engineered something anyone could use, fueling explosive growth.
• Song selection was key: “We selected 15 songs... some of the most recognizable and iconic... or meme songs... you don’t need to know English to vibe with it.” ([08:46])

4. Simplicity & Virality in Design

• “Stupid simple, stupid. You can give this to a 5-year-old and they'll know what to do.” ([09:40] Sam/Ben)
• Simplicity in UI and clear viral content loops (create → share → attract new users) are essential.
• “I find the best way to... get someone’s attention for the first time is to do something stupid and... funny. Not try to explain Socrates... but just tell a small joke. Give them a small piece of candy as opposed to a steak.” ([11:06] Ben)

5. Content-first Product Development (& Monetization)

• Focus on creating shareable outputs that thrive on algorithmic feeds (TikTok, Instagram Reels, Shorts, etc.).
• If a product enables users to easily create content that the algorithms reward, it’s primed for virality.
• “If something is going viral inside of like some technical circle, but it's still difficult for a layperson to use, then if you can help the layperson... that’s a really good sign that something might go viral.” ([14:41] Ben)

6. From Virality to Monetization, Mistakes to Profitability

• Ben candidly shares the challenge of ballooning infrastructure costs following viral growth:
  “Dream went viral again. We had a million-dollar server bill on Amazon for that month for all the inference... Money is fake, let’s just make an amazing product... Did not work at that point.” ([20:29] Ben)
• Entered 'cockroach mode' for profitability: focused on subscriptions (“you could generate four images at a time... premium styles...”), ads, and studied monetization leaders like Nikita Bier. ([22:13], [21:43])
• “At our peak Dream was doing over $500,000 a month.” ([22:41] Ben)
• “To get millions of downloads, 98%... use them for free. You make all your money on the 2% who don’t.” ([35:52])

7. The Next Wave: Peer-to-peer Inference & Decentralized Compute

• With Nvidia’s backing, Ben shifted focus toward infrastructure:
  “If there’s someone in my user base with an iPhone 16 Pro or... a computer with a 4090... what if they could run workloads for other users?” ([24:04] Ben)
• Rolling out W AI: lets users ‘rent out’ their device’s idle compute, earning points/tokens as reward. ([28:12])

8. Advice for Aspiring AI Founders

• Document viral trends; productize meme formats before they saturate.
• “If you want to brain rot, then you must be brain rotted first.” ([32:06] Ben) – scroll, save, and catalog.
• Speed matters—Ben describes churning out “stupid shit” (like celebrity pregnant cat memes) that repeatedly go viral with only small tweaks. ([33:17])
• One viral app can be a “nine figure opportunity... giving someone a bite-sized version of a movie ticket that they paid $3 for instead of $50.” ([35:52] Ben)

9. Do You Need VC? (Nope)

• “Do they need to raise venture capital for it? — Fuck no.” ([37:26])
• High-potential apps can be bootstrapped to millions in revenue with enough traction and sharp execution.

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Memorable Quotes and Notable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|-------|---------| | 00:45 | “If something is working, then probably you can copy it and put your own spin on it and it'll continue to work.” | Ben | | 04:05 | “Why doesn't someone just make an app... where it's simple?” | Ben | | 08:46 | “We really deliberately picked those 15 songs and then we really deliberately made the 15 driving videos for those songs. And that was, I think, key.” | Ben | | 09:40 | “Stupid simple, stupid.” | Ben | | 11:06 | “Best way to get someone's attention... is to do something stupid and funny. Not try to explain Socrates... just tell a small joke.” | Ben | | 12:01 | “There’s always been some kind of viral content creation loop...” | Ben | | 14:41 | “If something is going viral inside of some technical circle, but it's still difficult for a layperson to use... that’s a good sign.” | Ben | | 20:29 | “We had a million-dollar server bill... Money is fake. Let’s just make an amazing product... Did not work at that point.” | Ben | | 22:41 | “At our peak Dream was doing over $500,000 a month.” | Ben | | 32:06 | “If you want to brain rot, then you must be brain rotted first.” | Ben | | 35:52 | “One viral app... That’s a potential nine figure opportunity... giving someone a bite-sized version of a movie ticket.” | Ben | | 37:26 | “Do they need to raise venture capital? Fuck no.” | Ben |
| 38:09 | “Good luck to everyone. I hope you make it. It's a fucking crazy time to be alive.” | Ben |

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Step-by-step Playbook for Viral AI App Creation

1. Study What’s Working:
   • Meticulously analyze top apps (UI, content, engagement mechanisms).
   • Identify viral meme and content formats trending in niche and technical circles.
2. Lower the Barrier:
   • Make complex AI tech accessible and “stupid simple” to use.
   • Optimize UX for five-year-olds.
3. Engineer for Virality:
   • Create a content output instantly shareable on viral channels (TikTok, IG, etc.).
   • Content must be algorithm- and peer-share friendly; watermark it.
4. Monetize the Right Way:
   • Patterns: subscriptions, ads, upsells for premium features/styles.
   • Let 98% use free, monetize the 2% ‘super-users’.
   • Study monetization leaders in your niche.
5. Stay Adaptive:
   • Track/inventory trends (“brain rot” required).
   • Update rapidly; don’t be afraid to push out more of what’s working.
6. Don’t Overbuild or Overthink:
   • Launch simple; iterate fast; avoid overcomplexity.
   • You don’t need VC to play.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:45–01:43: Mimesis principle and Ben’s approach
• 02:00–07:13: Spotting models and meme formats, Wombo’s first steps
• 09:25–12:01: Product simplicity and the virality loop
• 13:16–14:41: Content/algorithm approach and adapting for B2B
• 16:15–18:38: Building Dream, leveraging new AI models
• 20:25–23:10: Monetization, war stories, subscription tactics
• 24:04–28:12: Moving to AI compute economy, peer-to-peer inference, and crypto x AI
• 29:31–35:52: Trend tracking, meme format productization, virality math
• 37:12–38:09: Final advice—opportunity, VC myths, scaling, mindset

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Wrap‑Up

Ben’s story is both playbook and cautionary tale: viral AI-powered mobile apps can go from joke to 100M downloads almost overnight, but you’ll face server bills, monetization puzzles, vicious licensing headaches, and team churn. The gold remains in accessible design, relentless trend-tracking, and keeping it “stupid simple.”
No VC needed—just meme sense, fast execution, and relentless appetite for trial and error. Or as Ben puts it, “Infinite opportunity, yeah. Yes... People are glued to their fucking phones and they want to be entertained and they want utility. So if you can be useful or entertaining, then you can make an app.” ([37:16])

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“Good luck to everyone. I hope you make it. It's a fucking crazy time to be alive.”
— Ben, [38:09]

Transcript

[Sam Parr]

This is not your standard SIP episode. I brought on this guy who went from 0 to 250 million mobile app installs using some open source AI models. He tells the whole story, how he did it. You know, it definitely fired me up around this whole new wave of creating multimillion dollar mobile apps in under seven months.

[Ben]

The Startup Ideas podcast.

[Sam Parr]

It's tipping time. Bab. Ben, you've created these AI apps. You've got hundreds of millions of downloads. You're backed by Nvidia. I want you to teach us. Well, actually, what do you want to teach us before? What I want you to teach us.

[Ben]

Yeah, I thought I'd just come on here and talk about a strategy that's worked well for me in many different domains in life. And it's sort of a basic fundamental of mimesis, which is? Which is if something is working, then probably you can copy it and put your own spin on it and it'll continue to work.

[Sam Parr]

Okay, and by the end of this episode, what are the concrete things that people are going to learn?

[Ben]

I'm going to show you how I've applied that strategy to a few different successful things in my life. How I used it. Come up with a concept for an app, my first mobile app ever, that got over 100 million downloads. How we use that concept to consistently go viral on Instagram and have reels that get millions of views and that are, on one hand a remix of something else that already exists, but on the other hand, something that we put our own unique flavor on.

[Sam Parr]

Okay. I mean, how to create apps that get millions of downloads, how to create content that gets millions of views, how to raise millions of dollars from people like Nvidia. You. You have my attention.

[Ben]

Okay, let's do it. It's actually pretty fucking easy if you don't overthink it too much. So, okay, first, very brief anecdote. I think I picked up this principle from video games. I was a Jungle Main and League of Legends. I was sort of like a platinum gold level player, which is like 60th, 70th percentile. I wanted to get better. So I started watching streams of players that were better than me. They were playing the same role and I would just copy them and then put my own spin. So that's where this sort of entered my head for the first time in the summer of 2020. I applied this to conceptualize and eventually launch one of the most viral apps ever, Wombo. So there were a few signals that I picked up on. First was reface. Reface in the summer of 2020 was the number one app on the App Store and Dreeson invested and led a five and a half million dollar round. And what got my attention about this was it was an app that I fully understood. So what did Reface do? Reface did face swaps. So you could put in like a cardi b music video, take a selfie. It would put your selfie into the cardi b music video. Hundreds of millions of downloads. Memes that, you know, my friends were sending each other. I knew which model they were using and how they were accomplishing this. And the design of the app was also very simple and intuitive and kind of made sense to me. So that was the first seed. The second seed was this PewDiePie video where he covered some very strange memes. And we can see the date here. Four years ago, August 2020.

[Sam Parr]

It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

[Ben]

Of course, this got 7 million views because it's PewDiePie. And this got my attention as well because this was another open source AI model that I was familiar with called the First Order Motion model. And it was starting to go viral in sort of the AI circles and also just like the hardcore, like, Discord artist circles, like people on their computers for like 14 hours a day.

[Sam Parr]

People like us?

[Ben]

Yeah, people like us. And they were using a Google Colab notebook to basically stitch this output together. He gave it a selfie, he gave it a driving video, which is what kind of creates this animated choreography. It's actually someone else moving their head around. And so this one driving video of a guy singing Baka Mitai went viral over and over and over again. And so one night, I'm smoking a joint with my roommate on the roof. We're looking at these memes. Someone had made a telegram bot where you could do something similar. We're like, man, like, why doesn't someone just make an app, like, where anyone can do this, where it's simple and so immediately, like, it kind of starts off as a joke, but the circuits start firing. Like, oh, wait, like Reface just did the same thing. They have hundreds of millions of downloads. Here's a new open source AI model that, like, no one's done this for yet. Like, easy. Like, we're going to be billionaires. We'll get this done in a week, you know? Did not take a week. Took us seven months. But in March of 2021, we launched Wombo. And maybe I can find a quick walkthrough on YouTube.

[Sam Parr]

When, when you had this idea and you saw that a 16Z reface company. Like, a lot of people would look at that and be like, okay, they're going to win this space. Like, you know, it's already going to get competitive. But you kind of said, no, no, I'm gonna create an. I'm gonna compete with them.

[Ben]

Yeah, I wasn't thinking that I'm gonna compete with them. I was just thinking, like, it's early, like there's lots of space to play. Like, I don't know, like there's. Where my mind goes to is like, like, like movie directors or, or musical artists. Like, we're never gonna run out movie directors or artists. Like, we're going to continuously want new, interesting shit. So I don't think anything is like, too crowded.

[Sam Parr]

Abundance mindset.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

Sam Altman, the co founder of OpenAI just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabowser.com every single day you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data. Trends, how we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building. And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more. Almost like a chatgpt for ideas with it. But you can start for free ideabrouser.com and if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.

[Ben]

So I'll just kind of briefly walk through this. You can actually see that in this video, this lady shows this old Google collab notebook for the first order motion model. It's like, my grandma could never use this shit. I mean, she could if I like taught her Python. Yeah. But like, she could never use it. So here we go. You would take a selfie. That's the first thing you do. Then you pick a song and then you sit through a little loading screen like this and then finally you get your output and we'll just see. See that at the end obviously looks super basic by 2025 standards, but literally those three screens have input song selection, output oh, sorry, loading screen and then output four screens. That's all we needed to get 100 million downloads. And we intentionally sort of designed something that would be extremely simple to use. The whole thing is engineered for virality in a way because the whole expectation is you as a user come in, you make a piece of content. You make that piece of content extremely easily and extremely quickly. And then your natural inclination is to share or to make another one where like your dad is the one singing or the pope or a politician or whatever. And so we spent no money on marketing and spent all our money on inference. And that's how the thing went viral. Maybe the only other thing I'll say here, and I'll kind of kiss my own ass a little bit here, is the song selection. We selected 15 songs that we launched with. And these are some of the most recognizable and iconic songs of all time. Or there were songs, there were kind of meme songs. And so like, you know, one example of something that would make a song a meme song is you don't need to know English to vibe with it. For example, boom boom boom boom by the Venge Voice. You don't need to know English. No, sounds great.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ben]

Wherever you are.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And so we really deliberately picked those 15 songs and then we really deliberately made the 15 driving videos for those songs. And that was, I think, key.

[Sam Parr]

And he made it like stupid simple.

[Ben]

Stupid simple, stupid.

[Sam Parr]

Like this is. You can give this to a 5 year old and they'll know what to do.

[Ben]

Exactly.

[Sam Parr]

A buddy of mine has an app that's going viral right now. Maybe you've seen it. Mixi Mixi. Yeah. Have you seen that?

[Ben]

I think so, yeah.

[Sam Parr]

So it's like a mashup. Like go to just Google Mixi Mixi app. I think it's with an I. There it is.

[Ben]

Oh yeah, I've seen this.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah. So it's like two guys, you know, you put two beats together, it mashes it up like simple idea. Right. But the UI is really simple and they're getting like. I mean, it's one of the top music apps. I don't know the monetization of this, but I think there's this whole next. There's this whole new generation of apps that are just like really stupid simple that. I mean, it's a similar concept. Right. Like I'm sure his songs are like. He's doing a queue of songs that, you know, people actually want to choose. Right. It's simple UI and it's viral because you want to share that on ig, et cetera.

[Ben]

Yeah. I personally like starting with Stupid simple. And maybe from Stupid simple you can do something more advanced and interesting.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah. With respect to mobile apps. Right.

[Ben]

With respect to mobile apps. And I mean, it all kind of boils down to attention at the end of the day. Like, if you're trying to make a product, it's not just someone's money that you're after. Like, even before that, it's their attention. And there's so many fucking distractions, there's so many different things that are pulling you in a million different directions at all times that I find the best way to sort of introduce myself and get someone's attention for the first time is to do something stupid and do something funny. Do something simple. Not try to fucking explain Socrates to them or something, but just basically tell a small joke. Or another analogy could be like, give them a small piece of candy as opposed to like, here's a fucking steak.

[Sam Parr]

Right?

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

Because what I'm trying to figure out, what I'm trying to reverse engineer, is how do you create a mobile app that gets millions of downloads? So Stupid simple one, what else?

[Ben]

So in our case, there's always been some kind of viral content creation loop, meaning someone comes in, makes a piece of content, shares that content on other platforms, and that's what drives your user acquisition. And so that whole component has a lot of extremely important details. So first is the content creation. How are you going to help someone make a good piece of content? Also, the game has changed since five years ago with how far generative AI has come and the kind of content that people are interested in making, but still I think it's applicable today. So here's how it boil it down. How do you help someone make a piece of content that either they're gonna post on Instagram and post on TikTok for the algorithm, and the algorithm is like, that's a great piece of content. Let's give it millions of views or more for their own personal networks. And the people in the personal network are going to be like, wow, that's really awesome. I want to make that thing too.

[Sam Parr]

So you're basically saying you start with the content, like the end content.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Sam Parr]

Which is kind of what my friend Joe is doing with Mixi. Right. Because he knows that people want to share these mixes.

[Ben]

Absolutely. And so one thing maybe we could touch on briefly is just the algorithmic feeds of today. The amount of human attention that is just being sucked into the full screen infinite scroll format, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or YouTube shorts or X has one that is just the battlefield of attention. And so I think a great source of product inspiration is to look at that and look at where are people's attention going? What kind of content are people making? Can I make it easier for them to make some piece of content that is consistently going viral over and over again and then put my watermark in the bottom right?

[Sam Parr]

Does this only work for B2C fun apps, or could this also work for B2B or prosumer type apps?

[Ben]

I think it could work for everything. You probably need to adjust your principles a little bit. Maybe I'm going to stop paying attention to the TikTok algorithm and start paying attention to, I don't know, the conference that all the people in a particular niche are going to, but it's the same thing. What do the people you care about pay attention to?

[Sam Parr]

Right.

[Ben]

And where.

[Sam Parr]

Right, yeah. And sort of the key point is like, look at what other. Look at the content, look at what's going viral and then apply that to whatever it is you're doing.

[Ben]

Yes. So in the case of Wombo, in the summer of 2020, it was, well, Reef is just got a number one app and hundreds of millions of downloads. And hey, there's this new model now, which is still very hard to use. This is another very good signal, by the way. If something is going viral inside of like some technical circle, but it's still difficult for a layperson to use, then if you can help the layperson get access to that same technology and make it easier for them, that's typically like a really good recipe for virality or a really good sign that something might go viral. So I'll just wrap up the Wombo story from kind of that moment of inspiration. It took us seven months to actually get the app on the App Store, but we finally launched it in March of 2021. It went insanely viral. Got like 50 million downloads in its first month, in first three months. And after sort of some just like stabilizing and taking it all in and raising a little bit of money and building out our team, the obvious next question was, okay, well, we just did this with one AI model. What other AI models can we do this with? And now this is a really obvious question to ask in 2025. Age of AI Again, 2020 was still a little bit different. Earlier, generative AI was not even a buzzword yet. And generative AI is already a buzzword that we've moved past now.

[Sam Parr]

Why? What's the latest now, I feel like.

[Ben]

Now it's just like AGI superintelligence, like agents. So the next concept was Dream, which was an artwork generator for the nerds. It predates midjourney and stable diffusion and Dall E and was basically the first time that image generation went viral. Now, of course, image generation is everywhere and we saw something very similar happening again. Almost the exact same thing we saw happening with Wombo. People were playing with combination of two models. Vqgan. Fuck. Vqgan and Prashant. I need your help. I forgot. What were the two models? Huh? It was VQGAN diffusion. VQGAN clip. That's right, VQGAN clip. So you combine VQGAN with clip, you could generate these crazy dreamlike images. There was like maybe 20 or 30 people on Twitter and really like five at the beginning who were like, messing around with this stuff. And those were like the earliest incantations of like, this era's neural networks for image synthesis. And we did the same thing. We wrapped that up into a fun and easy to use mobile app. We made an extremely optimized version of the model, which had fast generation times. And we did some templating to make it easier to create high quality images. Basically just adding words to the prompt that the user gave us. And exactly the same thing happened. Another number one app and many of the lessons that we learned from Wombo about give the user a simple to provide input. In the case of Wombo, as a selfie, in the case of Dreamo, as a text prompt, pre process that user's input with your own input. That kind of like structures it and makes it work well. So in the case of Wambo, it was the driving video. In the case of Dream, it was the kind of stylistic keywords that we were adding to the user's prompt, make the inference really, really fast and free for the user. Did that in both cases, put all that together in a fun and easy to use interface, and you have something with all the ingredients for reality.

[Sam Parr]

Okay, so it goes number one. What next?

[Ben]

Yeah, so just in terms of the trajectory of the company, listen, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Like, I'm not like one of these, like Silicon Valley kids who, like, watched every Paul Graham video. I was just like smoking weed in my bedroom playing League of Legends and like, really, really interested in AI, so made every mistake we could. But at that time, now we're sort of at the end of 2021. We had a team of about 20 people all working here in Toronto, got A few apartments that we were using as offices in 2022. We're like, let's raise money because that's what you're supposed to do. Ended up putting together a Series A where the lead investor kept us and due diligence for two months and then pulled out of the deal. And they pulled out of the deal partially because our original Wombo app used music. And there were some sort of unknown liabilities and risks around our use of music. I didn't know if I should bring it up with these mixie guys, but fucking. The music licensing people are vicious, annoying motherfuckers. But also, you know, it is what it is. And also partially because FTX crashed and all this crazy shit was happening in crypto and Zerp was over. Yeah, there was like a market spook. So we went from having fucking number one app thinking we're about to get $15 million to having negative Runway and being like, what the fuck just happened?

[Sam Parr]

Negative Runway meaning, like, you're out of money.

[Ben]

Yeah, like.

[Sam Parr]

Or you're like, really out of money.

[Ben]

Like really out of money. Where? And it really happened because that month dream went viral again. And we had a million dollar server bill on Amazon for that month for all the influence that we were doing. And I had like, maybe not the perfect philosophy around this, which. Which was like, money is fake. Let's just make an amazing fucking product. Let's get all the users. We'll figure it out later. Yeah. Didn't work at that point. So we went into like a year and a half of cockroach mode, basically where I wasn't paying any of my bills unless I absolutely had to. We were extremely focused on monetizing our product, which previously we had never given a shit about, and basically getting to like, profitability. And along the way we, you know, still raised some money from investors who believed in us. So, yeah, about a year and a half of cockroach mode got to profitability.

[Sam Parr]

And how did you monetize the apps? Because I think. Because I think that's a question that a lot of people have, which is like, okay, great, now I've built this mobile app, it's starting to get some traction.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

How do you think about monetizing? What's the sauce around monetizing mobile apps?

[Ben]

Just copy people who are better than you.

[Sam Parr]

So who's the best? Who's the best and what are they doing?

[Ben]

Fucking Nikita, man.

[Sam Parr]

Nikita Veer.

[Ben]

That guy is the. That guy's a great monetizer of apps. Shout out Nikita. Beer. Yeah, go. I Guess you can't do it anymore. But go like pay $10,000 to talk to him on Intro and I'm sure he'll give you some good tips.

[Sam Parr]

Okay, so how did you monetize it?

[Ben]

We introduced a subscription and we introduced ads. The subscription did things like, well, if you want to generate an image, you could generate four at a time instead if you're a subscriber or you could have access to some premium styles if you're a subscriber. And that took us from zero to, I think at our peak dream was doing over $500,000 a month. And that got us to profitability and sort of stability that we needed.

[Sam Parr]

And for like, what are we talking? Like $5 a month? $5 a week. I know a lot of people are doing weekly subscriptions now. Like, what was it?

[Ben]

We've done everything from $5 a week to $5 a month. We started really cheap and got more expensive over time. And there's also like all the like dark patterns that you could do with like hidden trials and all that kind of stuff. But we never went to too deep into that.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, okay. Have you. I'm sure you studied like Calai and what they do.

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Parr]

What do you think?

[Ben]

It's a new generation of killers, man. I love to see it. It seems like every few months now there's like a new 18 year old kid making $2 million a month on some simple stupid shit. And I think it's only going to accelerate. Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

And those apps are monetizing via subscriptions, right? Weekly, monthly.

[Ben]

I'm not sure. We'd have to double check.

[Sam Parr]

I think weekly. Yeah, I think that's a trend I'm seeing a lot is like weekly subscriptions. Anywhere from like $3 to $20 a week makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So going back, so you're. You start making money basically, and then what next?

[Ben]

Yeah, so we slowly emerge out of cockroach mode, I guess bringing us into 2023 and 2024. The most notable things that happened were one, we had a relationship with Nvidia. They approached us very early on because they saw that our apps were going viral and that we were doing this thing that was going to be called Generative AI and they want to kind of learn more about it and see how they could support it. Of course, it's evolved far, far beyond that now. And that culminated in us meeting them more and more and them making an investment into Wombo. The second thing that happened was I sort of, I lost some interest in making apps and I gained more interest. And you know, where all of this was going, where AI was going, man, this is going to be kind of a convoluted point, but it'll make sense at the end. Okay, so one thing that we've always cared about is inference efficiency. How do we make generation times extremely fast and how do we spend the least amount of money that we can on powering this inference? So initially that meant we are going to host our models on GPUs, we're going to sign a three year contract with Amazon where they give us some better pricing, and we're going to pay specialists $3,000 a day to make our model produce the same output, but in a fraction of the time. And it's just worth it to find a specialist like that. That was sort of the first solution. And, and then we're going to run all the inference on the cloud. Our users never have to worry about it. And it's consistent, it's high quality, it's reliable. Then there was a motivation to move some of this inference on device, especially as your user base has devices in it that are powerful and perfectly capable of running the model that you care about. And so we started doing a little bit of that. And sort of the natural extension of that is, well, if there's someone in my user base with an iPhone 16 Pro or a computer with a 4090 on it that can run their own workloads, what if they could run workloads for other users as well? And so that idea of sort of peer to peer computing and using our users computer was born out of our continuous push towards inference efficiency. Hopefully all of that is making sense so far. And so the other thing that happened was at the end of 2023, at the start of 2024, I got really interested in how AI and crypto would intersect. And so I looked at every project in the space, studied them closely, again coming back to that same principle of copy what other people are doing, or at least understand what other people are doing before you do your own thing. And so we looked at Bittensor and Jensen and Render and Akash and Golem and the Internet computer and folding at home and all these other sorts of examples of decentralized AI or decentralized computing happening. And I just ended up finding that extremely interesting. To make a long story short, aside from learning about those projects and even building in some of their spaces, the conclusion we came to was to build our own thing called W AI which would essentially allow anyone to turn their MacBook their gaming computer and in the future, their PlayStation or iPhone or whatever into a compute contributor. And so it's almost like Airbnb for that device. When you're not using it, you can make it available to the world. It's going to run some hopefully valuable workload and earn you a reward.

[Sam Parr]

And reward being money, reward today being.

[Ben]

Points, which will later turn into a token which will later turn into money. I'm not like media trained, so I don't know what I'm always.

[Sam Parr]

You're not media trained? I had no idea.

[Ben]

No, I'm not fucking media trained. But the idea is you are contributing to the network. Like, if I just let. If I let W. AI generate 10,000 images for somebody else on my machine, then I should be able to generate at least 10,001 images in return. And that seems fair.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, totally cool. And that's the journey.

[Ben]

That's the journey. A lot of crazy shit has happened in between. Cycled through the team many, many times. We started with six co founders. Only one remains. Three of them have started new companies that are very fucking cool and interesting. So check out Omega, check out Dippy. That's the Wombo mafia. And now we all live in a big ass house in LA. There's like 12 of us who live and work there. There's a few of us who don't live and work there, but are still core parts of the team.

[Sam Parr]

But yeah, and just to tie a bow on it, okay, so I think that there's a huge opportunity to build, and I know you agree too, build mobile apps that have an AI component to it.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Sam Parr]

A lot of, you know, like every startup, most fail. If you want to create a mobile app with some AI component to it that gets millions of downloads, the way to do it is step one, see how other people, like, understand your landscape. What are the other apps?

[Ben]

Go look at Calais, go look at ris, AI, Go look at all those apps.

[Sam Parr]

Right? Study them. Study, like, understand that every single screen, why they're doing it, how they're doing it, what colors they're using, what typography, everything. Step one, step two is from a content perspective, understand what is going viral in a bunch of different niches. Right.

[Ben]

And we can stay on this point a little bit. I have two collections that I think of interest here. This group chat on Instagram and this collection which I can actually make public and share with you if you'd like. This has been me sort of cataloging AI generated content or content that could have been generated by AI, which has gone viral on these respective platforms for the last, like, two years. So, for example, let's go. There was like a week or two where I was getting a bunch of these baby videos.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, Like Theo Vaughn. Yeah, yeah, I've seen these. Like the baby. This is with Hydra, right?

[Ben]

Yeah, this is with Hydra. And I think they were using ChatGPT to turn the original image into like a baby fight image.

[Sam Parr]

Okay.

[Ben]

And then Hydra to animate it.

[Sam Parr]

Okay. Hydra AI for folks who haven't checked it out. ChatGPT to create the reference image and feed that to Hydra. Okay.

[Ben]

Yeah. So I'll upload like a picture of Heisenberg. Be like, turn him into a baby, and then take that baby picture, bring it to Hedra. So maybe someone for the week or two that this was going viral or even now can make an app that just fucking abstracts that away from people. They don't have to worry about ChatGPT. They don't have to worry about Hedra. That's just take a selfie, choose a scenario. Done.

[Sam Parr]

Right. Basically productizing the content format is what you're saying.

[Ben]

Yes, exactly. It's also just useful to study how this stuff changes over time because the AI is not just transforming or creating content in one way. It's doing a bunch of different things.

[Sam Parr]

So is your advice to people just, like, scroll and then just save?

[Ben]

Yes. If you want to brain rot, then you must be brain rotted first.

[Sam Parr]

Right, true.

[Ben]

So lately we've been having a lot of success with some really stupid shit. And it's turning celebrities, extremely recognizable celebrities, into pregnant cats.

[Sam Parr]

Okay, like the Trump. Let's go. Open the Trump one. Hey, Elon, it's time for our litter to be born. Hey, Donald, why do these kittens look like Jeffrey Epstein?

[Ben]

So, like, why does this work? It works because you have celebrities who are recognizable. Works because it's kind of controversial. It works because pregnancy is a concept that everybody can evolutionarily, like, understand. And then male pregnancy is just something that shocks your mind a little bit.

[Sam Parr]

And it's top of mind. Right. This is right around when Elon and Trump were fighting. Yes, Right.

[Ben]

Now, the other thing about that meme I just showed you is we've repeated that exact same scenario, that exact same storyline like six different times, and it goes viral each time, including this one that has almost 20 million views. Hey, Messi, it's time for our baby to be born.

[Sam Parr]

Hey, Reynaldo, why does these babies look like I show speed.

[Ben]

So literally the exact same thing. Just changing the characters, changing the settings a little bit.

[Sam Parr]

Right.

[Ben]

And as a result, like, we can pump that out in like an hour.

[Sam Parr]

And so that, that got 18.8 million views on Instagram.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

And your goal is to get, you know, how many downloads from that?

[Ben]

Well, hopefully like even 1 or 2% is pretty good.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Right. Now this, it's a weird time for us where we don't care at all about our mobile apps and we care 100% about W. AI and this content is not really about driving downloads to W. AI it's more about keeping us sharp and on top of the algorithm. I think that's really important.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah. The reason I ask is just for people who are creating content like this, what sort of conversion rate should they expect?

[Ben]

Yeah, I think 1 to 2% is like a win. And I think also a lot of the downloads are not gonna. Like, it's possible that your downloads won't come from the video getting lots of views on the algorithm, but from people sharing some piece of personalized content with their friends. So like, for example, let's say we turned this thing, like whatever this recipe is into an app. Like if I turn myself into a pregnant cat, I might not post that on Instagram, but I might post that into like a WhatsApp group chat and it'll go like, that'll lead to some reality.

[Sam Parr]

Someone in the comment section, I can hear it already now, is gonna say, okay, I gonna go create an app that turns you into a pregnant cat.

[Ben]

Yes, I want 10%.

[Sam Parr]

No, no, that's not even what they're gonna say. They're gonna say, and you think that you're gonna get millions of downloads and then you're gonna be able to charge people $3 a week for the privilege to do that. That's crazy. You guys are out to lunch. That's what someone in the comment section is saying right now.

[Ben]

Yeah, I think that person is not entirely wrong, but they are wrong. If you make an app and it goes viral, even if it goes viral once and people never use it again, like that's a eight, nine, potentially nine figure opportunity. Think about it like you're making a movie. Like if you make a movie, people go to the movie theater and spend 20 bucks to watch the movie. Another 30 bucks to get a bunch of fucking popcorn and shit, and then they leave and they never think about that movie ever again. So like you're just giving someone a bite sized version of that that they paid $3 for instead of 50. So yeah, I think, you know, the other thing is with these apps, to get millions of downloads, 98% of people are going to use them for free. And you're going to make all your money on the 2% who don't. The 98% are going to drive your virality and keep making your content and sharing with their families and friends and getting you to the top of the app Store. And then the 2% of people who don't give a shit and they're just clicking buttons and they want the extra thing that you can't get for free. That's where you're actually going to make all your money.

[Sam Parr]

Cool. And let's maybe, let's end it on, you know, for people listening, you know. Do you really believe that there's a lot of opportunity to create mobile apps with AI right now?

[Ben]

Infinite opportunity, yeah. Yes.

[Sam Parr]

And why do you believe that?

[Ben]

Because people are glued to their fucking phones and they want to be entertained and they want utility. So if you can be useful or entertaining, then you can make an app.

[Sam Parr]

Do they need to raise venture capital for it?

[Ben]

Fuck no.

[Sam Parr]

And you know, how big of apps are we talking? Like, could they create, I don't know.

[Ben]

Like, it's no venture capital. Like, how, if I make a really good song, how many people will listen to it? If I make a really good movie, how many people will watch it? If I make, like, a really good recipe for some gum? Like, it depends on a lot of factors, but if you make something truly great and truly unique and then kind of truly captures the current moment, then I think you can get hundreds of millions of downloads and make at least tens of millions of dollars just with popcorn mobile apps.

[Sam Parr]

All right. I like it.

[Ben]

Yeah. And good luck to everyone. I hope you make it. It's a fucking crazy time to be alive.

[Sam Parr]

Thank you for coming on, sharing some sauce. And you fired me up to create a pregnancy cat mobile app.

[Ben]

I want 10%.

[Sam Parr]

Later, dude.

[Ben]

Much love.